Changsha had their first snow of the year overnight, which is a luck sign in China. It seems that lots of things are considered lucky over here. Changsha is only an hour and a half from Hong Kong, but as world away in weather.
Today was the first day of what will be very common the rest of our trip – waiting to get paperwork back. On Tuesday morning, we finalized the adoption. We’ll get the documents back on Friday afternoon. (That’s not too bad actually, one province requires you to wait 10 days to get the paperwork back!) Saturday we’ll fly to Guangzhou (pronounced gwong-joe) to do our immigration paperwork, but in the meantime, we get to spend a little family quality time.
Sarah today continued her clinging, but this time it was Daddy and nobody else. (Both of my shoulders are killing me!) We did hit a milestone today, however. On our shopping trip we bought a stroller and put Sarah in it. She cried a little, but as long as Daddy was pushing it and she could see him the whole time, she was fine. Hooray!
The store we went to is interesting. It’s government run, and is essentially a number of small, semi-independent shops that are not separated by walls. You walk around and find what you want and the sales person in that area writes you up a sales ticket. You take the ticket to a cashier and pay for the items and then go back to the sales person to pick them up. It’s interesting because you will see the same item on sale from several people at the same price. All of the sale people are eager to help you, but thankfully we had our guides Daphne and Ellen there with us to translate. Otherwise, we never would have known that Sarah wears size 90/50 and not size 80/46.
We bought the aforementioned stroller, a few outfits for Sarah (now that we know her real size) and a few toys for Jordan and Daddy. The prices were quite reasonable – we would have spent at least twice as much at home. Funny how “Made in China” can work in your favor sometimes.
As I’m writing, Sarah has cried herself to sleep (we’re determined not to let her set her own schedule no matter how much she fusses about it) and Jordan is sleeping in a bed right next to her crib – and it’s only about 9:30 PM. All is well in the world.